"The maelstrom sort of ended civilization and often the things that come out of it are dangerous - no obvious individual comparisons come to mind."

"Well, hopefully people will get used to me."

"Townies largely will if you give them time and your abilities aren't too obvious, and Saffron won't care at all."

"She doesn't, she hired me. I'm not your species, though, that's separate from the power - I guess locals seem to get grey hair as they get older and maybe nobody's looking that closely at my teeth -?"

"Folks will ignore the hair, yeah. Your teeth, oh... they aren't so obvious that they'll be a major issue is my guess? Unless someone's both unusually observant and prejudiced."

"Could be worse."

"Oh?"

"...if something were a major issue. That would be worse."

"Oh yes, that makes sense. I didn't know if you had something specific in mind. You said you were a different species?"

"Yeah. We're called Amentans."

"How uh, did you end up here?"

"I don't know. I guess one possibility is that the Maelstrom decided to kick up on my planet too and I was among the very first people it got."

"That... I hope that isn't it."

"Yeah, me too, but I don't have a way to find out."

"It's not impossible that Fifi would know?"

"Does she actually know things or just make pronouncements?"

"Sometimes she actually knows things, I can't tell how much of the time though."

"How can you tell that she ever does? If she's just guessing she might get things right by accident."

"I've never known her to be entirely wrong and she's very often clearly right - one time she scolded a friend of mine for not having freed up her schedule to care for her wife Lia, who arrived later that same day badly wounded. And was a complete stranger."

"They got married a year ago."

"But if she does that enough times, if Lia's a common name, if your friend took it as a prompt..."

"Lia isn't at all a common name. I've seen her get names wrong though usually there's a similarity and she's right a lot more often than she should be. But yeah, no individual thing is very solid."

"Well, I'll pay attention just in case, but I don't really credit it yet."

"Very reasonable of you."

"I suppose given that there isn't a maelstrom your civilization would be substantially different from ours."

"That and being a different species."

"Are there differences besides the teeth and hair?"